


Depth Perception

by montparnasse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, Second War with Voldemort, Slightly more than canon-typical violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-20
Updated: 2017-10-20
Packaged: 2019-01-20 10:12:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12430620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: October '95. The past portends the future. There's no time like the present for a history lesson.





	Depth Perception

It was London in ‘95, burning high with the first red flush of October and the autumn hoarfrost only just beginning to shiver through the bones of the city—everything suspended midway through that strange gaping sigh between _things fall apart_ and _the center cannot hold_ —and there was blood drying down deep in the grooves of Tonks’s boots. By then it was sometime past midnight and it was raining; the talking had gone very badly but the fighting had gone terrifically well, so while they waited on Kingsley and Moody to show for cleanup and questioning Fleur uncorked some whiskey she’d found in the cellar so they could have a congratulatory drink and a quick grope on a Death Eater’s tab. Through the wall-length windows the shadowplay of the trees reached long arms across the floor like hungry thieves.

They abandoned the whiskey when they found it half-congealed with flecks of some unknown gummy substance, settling instead for questing through the house in a scandalous show of unprofessionalism and trying on the most ostentatious pieces of jewelry they could find in the master bedroom until Tonks opened a closet door and spelunked her way into a lovingly kept collection of human detritus: bones, sections of skin torn from muscle and displayed like an infernal triptych, dozens of fingers, cross sections of spongy grey brain-ganglion, a whole leg, at least one liver, a woven mass of some unholy conception spliced together by a hack surgeon. Spilled like blood over it all she could smell magic, the sickly burnt-oil stink of an evil omen dissolving already into the nightmare-void of her subconscious.

“Well fuck,” she said, or maybe Fleur did; of late their thoughts and their dreams had begun to run together. At first she’d thought it was terribly sweet, a kind of mental overlap or somnambulist current-transfer wrought by intimacy and the ever-worsening wartime horrorshow, but now she was increasingly unsure if the war itself wasn’t responsible for all of it from the first kiss right down to the blood caked underneath her nails, bitten past the quick. They had swallowed it like any other contagion, slept with it and drunk it and ate it and breathed it in while it percolated in the morning coffee. If you ran a Geiger counter over her she wondered if she’d be found to be radioactive, contaminated, colonized by loss.

—

They’d been working together on reconnaissance missions and yawning through romantic late-night patrols since midsummer though they’d actually met that winter, when Fleur visited the Ministry to decide within twelve seconds of her ten-minute tour of headquarters that a future as an auror was not in her stars, and had no intention—here, a pointed glance skewered in Tonks’s direction as she spilled tea on a manila envelope full of classified paperwork—of suffering fools with plastic badges. That was back in slurry-blue late January with the ten-ton shroud of fog hanging over the city like a curse; by late June Fleur had a desk job at Gringotts which provided perfect cover for doing favors of extremely questionable legality for Dumbledore, mostly involving, as Tonks understood it, tracking the finances of Voldemort’s known associates still in the country. 

With the understanding that something had been afoot for much longer than even her most paranoid higher-ups would admit, Tonks (angling for a promotion at the time) had agreed when Dumbledore and Moody asked her to play along: she was to collect the data from Fleur several times per week under the guise of depositing her paycheck or transferring money between accounts, and in doing so would say something containing a series of carefully selected code words to let Fleur know it was her no matter what face she was wearing, and that she hadn’t been put under _Imperius_. Obviously she was very beautiful and scary as shit but none of it seemed to matter much to her; Fleur was as awkward with her mouth as Tonks was with her outsize voice and her long elastic limbs, with a penchant for morbid jokes and a near-pathological desire to prove herself that rankled with anyone who didn’t know her—and it looked to Tonks that most people never bothered. Often she went in just at the end of Fleur’s shift and offered to buy her a drink, which she accepted with the same glacial insouciance she seemed to do everything.

At first they rubbed along easily enough, if a bit caustically: Fleur was prone to inexplicable foul moods which had a tendency to exacerbate Tonks’s own quick temper, which coiled around and around itself like a grenade pin in futile attempts not to start drunken arguments before bursting into confetti-shreds and doing exactly that; Tonks herself, as Fleur gleefully pointed out on numerous tête-à-têtes tucked into the corners of assorted shitty pubs, was entirely too used to having her way and would descend into petulant weeklong sulks when she didn’t. On one of these occasions, a rainy evening in late July over post-patrol pints after three weeks of having her sensuous come-ons enthusiastically greeted and then spurned as smoothly as a glint of sunlight off a sheet of ice, Tonks asked if Fleur might like to come back to her flat so she could teach her a thing or twelve about getting the fuck over herself. They made it as far as the train station before Fleur shoved her into an alley behind another pub reeking of piss and stale beer and kissed her with a kind of gunshot force like a weather-front, searching, drawing blood.

That night they walked from the alley up the fog-dreamy road to Fleur’s Croydon flat, which Tonks had always assumed was financed by Maman from the breezy boudoir of a French Baroque somewhere in Gay Paree, but inside it was surprisingly lived-in and freezing cold: cheap street fair art on the walls, dishes piled in the sink of the matchbox-sized kitchen, records and books and clothes and morning coffee strewn across the couch and coffee table, several no-go areas she still hadn’t seen fit to clean (the fireplace, the hallway desk piled with teetering miscellany), damp bras drying on a coat hanger from the pantry doorknob. Altogether it felt not unlike home, which she filed away for later consideration as she slipped a thigh between Fleur’s legs and shivered underneath her cold fingers, palms dragging something electric up her belly to her breasts where her pulse ran wild, overflowing, drowning out any quieter voices.

After they fucked twice on the bed (neatly made) with the new box springs creaking merrily Fleur produced a joint from somewhere which she wouldn’t relinquish—Tonks had to grab her wrist when she wanted a hit—and watched Tonks get up naked and put on _Led Zeppelin II_ purely so they could fuck again to “Whole Lotta Love,” her thumb tracing over the hickey on Fleur’s breast as Robert Plant’s sexual yelping blurred into the sleazy heat-haze of the guitar. Laughing, Tonks leaned down and sucked a rosebud-imprint onto Fleur’s neck, tasting salt and old sweat and her perfume, something lavender and velvet-trimmed; Fleur’s thighs wrapped her hips, beckoning, holding her there like undertow, hair spread in spikes across the bed like a debauched Madonna, and then— _I’m gonna give you my love, ah, ah, ah_ —pressed two fingers inside her, still wet and open from earlier, and then drug them back up to circle her clit again, trailing just the very edge of her fingertips over it, honey-slow, blood-heavy, watching Fleur’s hips jolt into it, her hand yanking the sheet off the corner of the mattress and the china-blue sliver of her eyes open on Tonks’s as if compelled.

Somewhere in the middle of it Fleur surged up beneath her and flipped them, knees on each side of Tonks’s hips and her fingernails digging red half-moon weals into Tonks’s shoulders when she coaxed her closer, kissing her belly and dragging her mouth between her legs, running her palms slick with sweat and more up the backs of her thighs, squeezing her ass. Time slowed, honey-drip, arctic freeze, exhale, exhale. She pressed her tongue flat against the jut of bone coarse with hair between Fleur’s legs and then lower, parting the folds below like wet silk and stroking just the tip of her tongue around her clit before dragging it over her in lazy runic patterns, blood-warm and heavy, sucking, letting her bottom lip roll off it like half a kiss.

A second later Fleur shoved her back by the shoulders and sat too quickly, her palm cupping Tonks where she was spread out against the sheets, and then their hands were on each other, Fleur rocking into her hand with the flowing tidal rhythm of it. Their bodies and their breathing shifted with it, pleasure pulsing like a tremolo, current transfer, the rush of it and the melt like a match-strike diffusing like static electricity, a flooding spread of gold as she came, her head against Fleur’s shoulder with her teeth at the heartbeat-stutter in her neck as she let herself be pushed down again. Above her Fleur’s mouth was open making the small noises like broken violin strings Tonks was learning she made just before she came. When she finally did Tonks watched her head tip back and her whole body shake, her fingers clenched around Tonks’s wrist as her fingers moved, Tonks’s tongue tracing lazily over a nipple, feeling warm and wide open, everything new, the night air jangling down her body like a chord of sunlight.

It was hilarious, she decided afterwards, both of them stoned and fingerprint-bruised and starting the record over again and again with magic, both of the laughing too loud and eating leftover falafel and wrinkled olives from Fleur’s fridge with a hedonistic abandon that seemed almost poetic given the current state of the world at large outside the bed and their bodies. “Do you ever think about what we’re gonna do when we’re done with this,” she asked, gesturing with an olive to encompass the mess of the sheets, the gauzy wash of streetlight coming in through the gap in the curtains, their open mouths, their tangled legs.

“Are you proposing to me,” asked Fleur, like a sullen muse. “Try it with more tongue next time and we’ll see.” Tonks had pulled the afghan at the end of the bed around her shoulders but Fleur was still naked, not a goosebump on all her skin. No matter how cold she got she never shivered.

“Ha bloody ha. I mean after, you know, all the sturm und drang and wartime agony. Are you gonna stick around like, after the smoke clears.”

“Mmm. My prospects here are as good as anywhere.”

“I’ll say,” said Tonks, hand inside Fleur’s sweat-sticky thigh, smiling what she hoped was her most lewdly suggestive smile, which in combination with the Zeppelin and probably the pot did make Fleur laugh, something she’d heard one of the elder Weasley men liken to church bells after an Order briefing but which she found to be more like ice cracking at the first melting green gales of spring. Loud and unashamed and heady with might. “I’ll suffer with you if you suffer with me.”

“All I do is suffer with you,” said Fleur, and that was that sorted.

—

After a morning spent questioning suspects and a few days of research including a sleepless night of translation work looking up obscure runes in one of Grimmauld Place’s many dictionaries they determined that the hellscape they’d stumbled into was meant to be put towards uncertain dark rituals. The options were uniformly grotesque: this was the groundwork for some kind of mass necromancy, or these were the remnants of failed experiments, or else Death Eaters were attempting to forge some monstrous, devouring wicker man out of stolen blood and unwilling bone and evil intent. Reports from spies after early 1981 were scant and often irrelevant, but she’d found one from Caradoc Dearborn just before his disappearance that summer which indicated they’d been attempting something similar even then: a massive piecemeal beast with a thousand gnashing teeth, unbreathing, unspeaking, unliving, capable of breeding a kind of nightmare horror he seemed scarcely able to elucidate. Tonks liked Option Number Three.

The plan was to disrupt the Death Eaters’ go-ahead signal and then destroy everything they could when backup from the Order rushed in; it was too late for infiltration, it would effectively have to be a hit-and-run. Moody wanted Bill Weasley to go with her but Tonks dug in her bootheels and insisted it would be Fleur or no one because it was Fleur who’d been with her then and Fleur who was bound to be with her to the end: you go to the dance with the girl who took you to the goddamn dance. This was when Arthur, having apparently nothing better to do than drink firewhiskey and offer a play-by-play of last night’s quidditch game with Mundungus Fletcher while Molly cleaned the kitchen, chimed in to say that Bill was the perfect man, the deafening undertones of which were not lost on Tonks. Delegating these things could be so difficult, Elphias Doge opined, when one observed the embarrassment of riches in the room. Tonks was the only woman present.

That they had no trouble delegating to whom cooking and cleaning and free childcare should fall said everything, Tonks announced. A brief shouting match with Moody ensued, which she won: on Wednesday afternoon she and Fleur apparated to the outskirts of a very old Wizarding hamlet in Kent, where they rented a room at the only inn and watched the evening darkness lap at the autumn forest surrounding the chalk hills, the late sunlight fragmenting through the tree branches like a bloody prism. When the darkness swallowed the sunset shadows they put on their coats and shared one last cigarette before they stepped outside, the moon hanging low through the rangy wisps of clouds, fever-yellow and scythe-hungry; she almost smiled.

“I can smell smoke,” said Fleur, right into her ear at the lip of the woods. Underneath the black jacket she was dressed as ever like a weird ‘90s version of a mod girl and she was smiling, her wild vivid shock of teeth not sharp so much as they were very angular, not unlike the rest of her; sometimes it was obvious to Tonks what her other self would look like, if she were a full-blooded veela. “They are not far.”

“You know that whole primal witchy-woman thing you do really does loads for your mystique.”

“Another for the Christmas catalog of your sexual whims.”

“Do you _honestly_ think I’m so self-centered I can’t give you a compliment totally unrelated to my own delayed gratification.”

“How delayed is it when you’re wearing your heat-seeking stretch jeans,” Fleur started, and then laughed when Tonks put an arm around her waist, aiming an elbow on purpose into the soft inward curve of her side, “Tonks— _honestly_ you make me want to get naked in the woods and put on Throbbing Gristle and try blood magic. And blow something up, obviously. So why don’t you think about that while you are trying to put a use to all that excess energy after this, yes?”

That eventuality was terrifying and almost unbearably sexy but dutifully she filed it away into the overstuffed pocket of her forebrain where she kept her mum’s trifle recipe and various unfortunate sexual feelings and fragments of poetry she’d never write but which sounded fucking gorgeous in her head; it was an auror compartmentalizing technique meant for genuine hideousness and ticking emotional time bombs but in a pinch she’d found it worked for most anything else. “Everything ready,” she asked. Even in her flannel she shivered a bit. Perhaps unwisely she’d left the first three buttons undone for the drama of it all.

Fleur patted the front of her jacket where she’d hidden the souped-up jammer they were using to disrupt the Death Eaters’ radio signal when the time came, at which point Tonks would blast the whole area with a good cleansing _incendio_ while Fleur gave the cue for the Order to send in backup. Together they stepped forward at last into the curtain of the trees. Far overhead she could hear owlcalls cutting into the night winds, the chorus of the trees and the underbrush almost like a voice shivering through her hair, _hurry, hurry, hurry_.

Very old things lived in forests like these, born of death and dust, fed on the milk of fear and sustained always by the singular human legacy of suffering. Twice she thought she saw something from the corner of her eye like a shadow changing shape but when she turned her head up towards the rising sepia sliver of the moon she saw nothing but the lullaby-sway of the branches, the pitchy smokestack-haze of the clouds; from the west they heard a voice or the specter of a voice, groaning lowly as if surfacing from beneath the weight of unquiet dreams. The blue arc of their wandlight showed nothing and she began to wonder if it had actually come from her, somewhere down deep beneath her heart and her lungs and further still, where the hurt and the fear and the anger all lived.

“Do you ever think about,” she asked, trying to blink the strange red blur out of her eyes, “like, your blood? That this is—all the worst magic is, you know, that’s in there too.”

“More than _you_ do.” Pointedly Fleur tossed her hair back across her shoulder; in the dark it was almost luminescent, like a wraith or a distant lighthouse beacon, thrumming with irrepressible magic.

“Right. Sorry.”

“Are you?”

“Yes, God, you know I am, you don’t have to get bitchy about it—”

“ _You_ certainly have nothing to be bitchy about but here we are.”

“Look, I am _sorry_ , and you are _right_ , and I mean it,” said Tonks, palms up not in apology as much as appeasement. Late in June they’d taken their first infiltration job together at a pureblood gala in Leeds during which they pretended not to know each other and flirted outrageously until afterwards, when Tonks made a comment back at Grimmauld Place after three glasses of wine concerning the perils of being a half-blood which, as Fleur pointed out with a voice like she’d just stepped in dog shit, was as good as a load of hot garbage when one was Muggleborn or part-human. “I meant like, what we’ve inherited.”

“Legacy, whether you want it or not.”

“Yeah. That you have the capacity to do these things too, and that everything fucked up in the world is maybe even partly your fault—like what good is this if you don’t use it towards something? And deep down we don’t give a shit about anything but our own. Only some of our own, even.”

“Write yourself a manifesto, Agent Tonks. You’re getting there after all,” said Fleur. Beyond the trees, a sound like an animal dying. “This is like a bad dream.”

“That’s another thing,” she said, “all of this—”

“War, you mean. What we inherited.”

Everything had gone quiet when she wasn’t listening: the trees, the nightbirds, her own breathing, the darkness swallowing, stained at the edges with something livid and starved, famine-sharpened, the smell of the air acrid and warmer now, like something left to fester into mold and rust in an attic, eager to see and be seen. “Which I suppose was inherited from somewhere else first.”

“It is like, the truest umbilical connection. Their war is our war and ours will be the next. All we ever really do is keep paying for each other’s mistakes because we would rather forget than stare at our own reflection for too long. Et cetera.”

“Is that really all.”

Fleur snorted, but even in the dark Tonks could see her eyes soften—she could feel it, like a ripple skipping sweetly down her rib-rungs and her soul-meat. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. Then something cracked with a shrill glass scream and tore through the trees, glancing off Fleur’s shoulder, and the whole woods started to howl, smelling blood.

“Holy _shit_.” She pulled Fleur along beside her in wild zigzag patterns the way you were supposed to run from a crocodile, which hilariously enough was also how you were supposed to run from a curse; Tonks could hear her fumbling with the signal jammer, hissing through her teeth against the searing icepick-pain of it, knowing from the smell alone that already it had begun to blacken and blister. Nearly as soon as she got the shield up around them they pulled up short: through the open belly of a copse surrounded by century-thick tree trunks there was fire, the shadows red as blood and life and nightmare, the voices through their masks clamoring into the monstrous thunder-crush of the flames like infernal penitents, as if the earth had split open at the seams of the oldest wound, spilling poison, bloated with evil, hurting and hurting and hurting.

No time, she understood, watching them circle the feet of something massive like plague doctors siphoning hatred pure and seething. They wouldn’t have a chance to call for backup with so many of them—they had been expected. Gulping down air and bile she crouched with Fleur at the gnarled foot of an ancient oak while she started jamming the signal, coaxing the slick silvery threads of a countercurse into her blistered and bleeding shoulder, knowing it was the best she could do for now. It was desperately hot but she could feel the flames and their magic humming a sickly drumbeat-dirge off her skin like cold rain as her head swam with deathly calculus: under heavy fire you could keep a shield up for thirty seconds, forty-five if you really put your back into it. _Impedimentia_ would only get you so far when you had a crowd to contend with and more often than not she found it was a waste. They needed two minutes, and then they needed to vanish.

“Can you keep up a shield with that arm,” Tonks asked. Both of them stood, her own knees cracking, Fleur’s nose turned up to the wind as if scenting something.

“On my bloody _deathbed_ ,” said Fleur. Off in the clearing there was confusion: they’d lost the signal.

“That accent really adds a certain je ne sais quoi, just for your information. But listen—let’s stay close. When we get around the other side I want you to cast _immobulus_ , that should freeze up any fleshy bits. Then as soon as you see it go up in flames, we grab each other and run. Got it?”

Maybe it was the cocktail of pain and adrenaline, or possibly it was the bare and galvanizing fact that this was their loudest overture yet to the open arms and ears of death, or—more likely still—it was the impossible seismic enormity of love, of becoming, of yearning and giving and taking and courage and cowardice and belonging, the simplest solution to a complicated equation: Tonks loved her. Thus Fleur seized her by the shoulders and kissed her, bruising and with teeth, wishful with hope. At last Tonks let go, unpeeling herself like ripping off a bandage in her fucking hair, and together they crept quickly to the other side of the copse, the Death Eaters searching already, sniffing them out; twice they dodged more curses, once a hex that uprooted a birch tree, Tonks’s heart balanced on her tongue clean between her teeth, careful not to bite down and do herself any irreparable damage before they could finish the job.

Roughly three seconds after they moved into position they had a clear shot of the beast, both Death Eaters serving as quasi-guards having moved with the others to skim across the trees, firing off hexes in whichever direction they thought Tonks and Fleur had fled. Even as they held their breath for the long plunge into whatever fathoms of breathing hell waited Tonks realized this was odd, but there was nothing for it: it would be now or it would be never. Unspeaking they got their shields up and surfaced into the viscous firelight, everything stained red like fresh liver or moth-bitten theater curtains, and forged ahead for better or for worse.

The figure was a massive wicker man, a monolith at least twenty feet tall with a frame made of wood and acres of straw with bloody, throbbing masses of flesh unlike anything she’d ever seen growing around it and inside it from head to elephantine foot and extending into the dry earth like roots, veins thick as ropes curling up both legs and branching out of sight into the tumescent thorax. Some spongy substance protruded from its head but from this far below she couldn’t tell what it might be. Dizzy, she looked up to find her balance and caught sight of the sky, rimmed red like an infected eye with an unreal spill of milky stars spilled like stones over the trees; unmistakably she could hear thunder, could feel it shaking the scorched ground, the choking effluvial iron-rot coming from seemingly every sutured inch of the man making her eyes water and her throat sting. Already it was breathing; soon it would have a heart beating on its own. Beside her she could hear Fleur retch.

It was not of this world—it could not be of this world. Yet it was perhaps the truest thing ever born of this world. It was made of magic and it was made of death and fear and hatred and horror and it was insatiable and it was eternal—it was every wound unhealed, every lesson unlearned. Nothing would ever slake its thirst. As if in a dream she understood with a moment of vivid and crystal nightmare clarity that this would happen again. All of this would happen again.

Knees shaking a bit she watched Fleur cast _immobulus_ , both of them scarcely breathing, a strange rumbling rubber-band tremor shiver beneath their feet, the sound of it like pressing an ear to the bellow of a conch shell. Nearly simultaneously they both looked up at a perfect square hole near the belly, incongruous enough that it looked recently made, possibly sawed out with magic just that night. If this was myth or an arthouse film she guessed they’d almost arrived at the part where the sacrifices would be herded inside just before the burning began.

“Fuck,” she gasped, her stomach bottoming out, “oh fuck, Mary fucking _Christ_.”

Later Tonks would remember most of it in vibrant slideshow fragments that sawed relentlessly along her nerves when she or Fleur woke in the middle of the night flushed clammy with horror, chewing on old bones. Through the trees they saw the white of the masks watching out of the darkness like owls stalking prey, twenty of them at least, their feet stomping out of time as her heartbeat ricocheted through her teeth and every laddered notch of her spine, a splitting, ear-ringing frisson spreading in a nauseous wave through her and into Fleur, who made a grab for Tonks’s elbow just as one of them howled, a rabid guttural animal sound, distorted and fracturing all around and so help her it sounded like it was coming from the trees themselves. Like a live-wire Fleur tore them from the spot and they ran blindly, deep into the belly of the forest, the voices and the feet flooding after them in a symphonic beastly stampede, hell unloosed and ravening at their heels.

“ _Move_ ,” she screamed more to herself than to Fleur, both of them tripping over one of the wicker man’s knotted entrails descending into tendrils beneath the earth, soft and bruise-blue like the innards of a rotten fruit. For all the good it did she cast _impedimentia_ over her shoulder, the muzzy spell-net of it catching three or four of them around the ankles and slowing their arms and their voices to a gluey underwater daze; the rest followed, stalking forward in the same demonic time signature, spells bursting over the rim of their shields and bludgeoning through their heads and into their guts like bombs whistling out of thin air, and their hands—all their pale knifeblade hands grasping, tearing, their mouths wide open, wailing, chanting, oil-black cutout visions of hell spreading across the backcloth of the night.

Vengefully she pulled Fleur off to the right and then the left, both of them trying to catch their breath. Their footsteps were echoing strangely and she could no longer feel her fingers. Far above the moon had disappeared; everything looked the same, everything felt the same, at some point a Death Eater’s hand had caught her in the mouth and all she could taste was blood through the swelling sting of her lower lip. Hysterically she wondered if any of this was even real or if perhaps they’d wandered onto the set of a really fucking good snuff film when what she’d thought was an owl dropped out of the trees and rushed them, breathing like a sizzling fuse through clenched teeth, lips pulled back in some feral hellbeast snarl.

“We have to,” Fleur rasped, her own hands reaching as they ran, trying to rip a hole out of the night, “we have to go back—we have to finish.”

“Alright. Alright.” Sucking in another breath through her mouth she turned with Fleur to the west again, the light unfolding out of the darkness like the gates to the final ninth circle of hell, hands and masks and voices streaking by like white pointillist smears of death, both their hands shaking and Tonks’s heart slamming, screaming out of her skin with a kind of electric purging doom-song: now or never. Now or always. “Run—just fucking _run_!”

The spell was in their mouths before they even reached tree-curtains of the the copse. As they heaved the molten bonfire-swarm of magic onto the wicker man Tonks could hardly see through the heat and the red frost-film hanging on the air, no light and no sound but the whistling mouths of the flames and the Death Eaters’ sawblade wailing rattling through every nervous vein. From all around they came again, from the trees and the mutilated ground and the black-hole void itself, leaping, arms outstretched like some unconsummated pietà out of Hades come to seize the holy wounded for the killing pyre. Turning sharply she grabbed Fleur just as one of them went for her gut with their fists like a wild animal making a kill, the pain fanning out in a bruising theremin-hum across her belly and her exhausted ribs until she aimed a hex at their head and started running again. Fear diluted everything, even love and even pain, but she found sometimes she was grateful for the numbing radar-pulse firing along her nerves, pulling her out of herself and into something else.

“Six points,” she said as quietly as she could. Order recommendations included three apparition points after any job; auror regulations dictated six in the event tracking was suspected. Tonks could count on one hand the times she’d had to put it into practice—and never with so many. There was barely enough time for a running start.

“Try _eight_ ,” said Fleur.

All around them she could hear the elegiac tidal screaming following as if disembodied, the muscle and the ruined fleshy grist of the wicker man popping, the mummified sound of the trees and the mummified groan of the wooden frame as its limbs began to burn at the gargantuan joints. There must be a hundred other places just like this, Tonks thought insanely. Ten thousand the world over, deathless, indestructible, unconquerable, older than myth and stronger than blood and magic and time. Letting her magic blur with Fleur’s she focused as deeply as she could and pulled her tight by the elbow, reaching into the wild bluebell flicker-flare of their wills, and then Tonks unzipped them through the trees, through the blood of the brittle October night.

Surrey was first—the High Weald cold and clear and bloodless as death, and below the hill the faces, the hands, circling like coyotes and rushing, screaming—then Blackdown where she and Fleur had gone for a picnic in August, her body spinning with it as her knees buckled. Apparition in quick succession felt like being sucked down drain, unplugged; her eyes were watering and down the hill in the moonlight-spray of their wandlight she could see white through the trees, carrion creatures, their masks searching—

“Get up. Tonks,” Fleur was saying, panting, grasping her shoulder with a clammy hand, “you have to. If you don’t get up I will drag you up.”

Against the spinning blackness she closed her eyes and wrapped both hands around Fleur’s wrist, focusing into the dense sonar-spread of spatial memory until the earth stopped quaking at her feet and she opened her eyes (vision almost entirely black and smeared at the edges) to something out of a a midnight pastoral, stumbling onto a clapper bridge at Dartmoor. “Mum loves this place,” she slurred, hearing the snap of twigs close by, not daring to look.

“Hold on,” Fleur whispered. When Tonks opened her eyes to the grim and rigid geometric landscape she puked immediately onto her own boots.

“Yorkshire,” she said, a bubble of hysteria rising in her chest, “this is a coalfield. Leave it to you. We’re in fucking _Yorkshire_.”

“And we are halfway done, so I do _not_ want to hear _shit_ about it, thank you. You can—you can start us home.”

Clasping Fleur’s hand again she swallowed and felt for her magic just as she heard faint footsteps, carrying high on the needle-cold lilt of the breeze, the stars swirling, falling overhead. When they’d been wrung out of it they were in Keswick, just outside the stone circle about half an hour’s walk from town. Not far off she could see the lake brimming full with the October rains, the trees catching the light refracting off the water and showing their autumn blood even in the dark of the woods. Fleur didn’t wait long and didn’t let go of her hand before she let the night swallow them; when it opened its palm to let them out again they were at Anglesey, the shoreline battered by the freezing grey sea. Far down the coast a lighthouse beacon cut inconsolably through the dark, steady as sorrow, dissolving into the waves like yearning.

Before she could think too much about it she took Fleur’s elbow again and apparated them to some heathland in Suffolk, the feeling of it by now like straining for a press-up you could barely do or trying to surface from somewhere very deep underwater, a kind of wringing in the lungs and the gut. After Fleur leaned over and dry-heaved they searched with wandlight as far as they could see but nothing moved except the wind in the grass and the clouds, swollen with coming rain. She leaned in and wrapped her hand around the back of Fleur’s neck, her breath rattling in her chest, nearly insensate.

“You’ve got this,” she said, and then the ground dropped away from them and out of sight.

Messily Fleur had landed them in the alley near her flat, the same one that stank of piss and shitty stale beer in which Tonks had nearly busted her head clean open when they kissed for the first time, months ago now; they collapsed together into a heap of hurt and breathless, unbelieving elation, their limbs tangled like marvelous jelly, Tonks’s nose bleeding sluggishly onto Fleur’s shoulder. Her lip had begun to throb again after the adrenaline spike and now the sudden inertia as she spat blood twice and then a third time before she ran her tongue over her the gash on her lip and her teeth, realizing it was chipped. When she tried to take stock of all their pieces Fleur started taking off her shoe and then her sock, which was sodden with blood where she’d splinched off half her little toe. There was a curious symmetry to it: one toe, one tooth, left behind as brutal relics.

“Well fuck,” said Tonks, her voice reedy-hoarse, like she’d been swallowing broken glass.

“You did ask me to suffer with you,” said Fleur, hardly any sound in it at all. Gingerly she flexed her foot and winced.

“Yeah but I didn’t mean like, bodily.”

“Psychological bulldozing is only to be expected and dearly anticipated, though.”

“Fuck off.” The streetlight across the road was buzzing, showering a sleepy row of flats in its numbing, unsweet glower. Everything in her felt shredded, freshly mauled; dizzy and already so sore she hated to move she bent her knees and got to her feet, the elbow of her coat sleeve wet with something she didn’t want to think about. “Can you get up?”

Fleur sort of grunted and let herself be pulled up, staggering delicately into Tonks as they both took a bracing step backwards, but their feet held—rooted, she supposed, in the thick of each other, in love, in the easy continental drift of their bodies, in death and in dreams, for better and for worse, amen. Never in her life before had she heard London so quiet; they might as well be the only breathing bodies for miles and miles, limping forward together like the same two-headed creature dreaming the nighttime city, their breath unscrolling like hoarfrost upon a window and melting into the ether like a wish unacknowledged and unsatisfied.

“How are we going to explain this,” Fleur asked. Tonks’s ankle nearly gave out when Fleur slumped heavily against her shoulder but Fleur caught her around the waist, half-carrying her for a step or two until the pain dissolved into a pinprick-splinter in her heel. “I’ve got you.”

“Thanks,” she said. Then, after another step, her heart beating, “I don’t know. Definitely it’s not going to happen tonight, at least. I feel like, really, what we were talking about—what we inherit. That this is really very old and really it’s only the beginning and we didn’t, we couldn’t rip it out by the roots. It’s completely fucked.”

“And someone else will inherit it from us, someday.”

“I don’t like to think about that.”

“But it is true.” By the alley entrance they slouched on the brick wall, hips and shoulders touching, just breathing. “It did not start with us and I don’t believe it will end with us, either. It will go on. On and on and on and on until the end of everything.”

“Keep it up and you could get a job writing greeting cards.”

“Take me somewhere nice once in a while and I might indulge your ego,” said Fleur. Then she leaned up and kissed the corner of Tonks’s mouth where the blood was drying, their breath peach-warm and sweet, sweat drying cold in their hair and their hands on each other, not letting go, not letting go.

The tautology of it struck her at an oblique angle, struck and astonished, like walking into a low beam or warming her hands on a mournful glance of dusklight through an open window, memory, reverberation, shadows lengthening, seasons swallowing, nightmare recurring, years unwinding, the seed turning fruit again, cyclicality, echoes, time and time and time. Together they turned the corner and walked home with their heads bowed and aching on the narrow road into the north, neither for the first time nor the last.

—

Months later, just before Christmas, Tonks woke sometime before dawn and walked as quietly as she could to the bathroom with her feet freezing and her heart rattling around in her throat, feeling unstuck from her skin and the bed, as if she’d fallen from a great height and all her limbs and her earthly soul hadn’t yet slammed back into her body. On the other side of the bed Fleur was snoring almost prettily; it had snowed in the night, London an amnesiac recollection of itself, the winterlight dimmed mellow in the hush of the streetlights like an enchanted memory in a Pensieve. One set of footprints led all the way down the street in the dark outside the bathroom window, destinationless and unbroken.

In her dream too there had been a nervous shimmer of new snow, a dark frigid forest with a waxing red sickle-mouth of a moon hanging like an open wound over the naked and swallowing reach of the tree branches, and in the very heart-meat of the woods a hand digging through the snow, white and ungloved, plunging into the earth as if into the warmth of a womb until it came up with the gestating fragment of her tooth, cradling it against the life line of its palm like a thing just born. Beneath her feet something like a heartbeat began to murmur under the shifting molasses-spread of the shadows, the night winds in the trees clamoring like breath, like a voice, groaning into torturous life, livid with hunger.

Would it always be like this, she wondered. Would it ever be over—would this be always? Had they been here before? Had they ever found their way out?

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a fill for a fest that I couldn't get done on time and turned into the _Wicker Man_ -inspired fic absolutely no one asked for. Be the weird fic you want to see in the world, etc.


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